Almond, Ian

Ian Almond is a British academic who teaches English Literature at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He has lived in many other parts of the world: Germany, Italy, India, and Turkey, where he taught for six years at Bogazici University in Istanbul. Almond considers himself to be a Christian Socialist. Besides the two books featured in his Rorotoko interviews, Two Faiths, One Banner (Harvard University Press/I.B.Tauris, 2009) and History of Islam in German Thought (Routledge, 2009), Ian Almond is also the author of Sufism and Deconstruction (Routledge, 2004), and The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam (I.B.Tauris, 2007). His books have been translated into Arabic, Korean, Persian, Bosnian and Indonesian.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011